Five reasons for Reid to belt up

Five weeks into his new job. Five massive cock-ups - and counting. Home Secretary John Reid is making a prize ass of himself at the department of state beyond satire.

1) He says crime victims should sit on parole boards - then ditches the plan.

2) He dons a flak jacket to watch police launch dawn raids on suspected foreign criminals - as if a Minister has nothing better to do. And his presence, say lawyers, may jeopardise their deportation.

3) He says all thugs caught with knives should be jailed for five years. And it turns out that he voted against that very plan when it was proposed by the Tories.

4) Next, he tells us to 'stop moaning and take action' against crime. In the ensuing outcry, spin-doctors say he had nothing to do with the slogan. But a leaked document has his fingerprints all over it.

And now 5): Mr Reid lays into soft sentencing, blaming it all on lenient judges. And walks into a damaging row with the Attorney General.

Yes, judges bear a huge share of the guilt for letting dangerous criminals off far too lightly. And the Human Rights Act has given them too much power to make up rules. But the Government lays down the laws the judiciary has to interpret.

Mr Reid's party came up with the preposterous idea that sentences should be cut drastically if criminals pleaded guilty - even if they were caught red-handed. His party expanded electronic tagging (is anyone surprised by today's news that 600 early release criminals are at large after slipping their tags?)

Mr Reid has been charging around like a belligerent bull, in the hope of a few favourable headlines in the red-tops and distracting his critics from the farrago of incompetence immersing his department.

But this is not a time for posturing and spin. It is a time for considered thought and determined action.

Longer sentences mean tougher, less equivocal laws. Draft them, Mr Reid. They mean more prisons. Build them. And if you really want to curb the power of judges, don't just shout about it. Why not do it at a stroke by scrapping Cherie Blair's beloved Human Rights Act?

Passports to fraud

There are 12million more National Insurance numbers than there are people in Britain - 12 million fake passports to our benefits system.

All it takes is an NI number to gain improper access to Gordon Brown's tax credits - as thousands of immigrants have discovered, milking us of millions.

Unbelievably, officials have been told to turn a blind eye to fraudulent applicants. The idea is to boost the numbers in the Chancellor's incompetently run scheme.

So we have a Government actively encouraging people to cheat taxpayers, to save its own face. Sad, isn't it?

A policeman's lot

Readers will make up their own minds about the Muslim brothers released without charge after 250 police descended on them, shooting one and ripping their home apart in a vain search for bombs.

On the surface, their accounts are horrifying. Who would think this could happen in a civilised country?

We do not know the whole truth. What we do know is that the brothers' words yesterday will have done nothing for the future of the Met Commissioner, who ordered the raid.

The problem with Sir Ian Blair is that he has form as long as your arm: hounding officers on bogus charges of racism; taping his private conversations; misleading his police authority over the cost of evicting an anti-war protester from Parliament Square. And now he wins the backing of a discredited Prime Minister.